David McElroy

The arrogance of collectivists seems to know no bounds. What’s even worse, their attitudes are so ingrained that they don’t even realize they’re being arrogant. Instead, they see themselves as magnanimous folks helping the collective.

Two completely unrelated stories Monday focused my attention on this. First, I read comments from retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens defending the decision he wrote in the infamous Kelo case — the one that made it legal for local governments to take property from pretty much anybody and give it to private entities to do what they want with it.

Even now, he seems to think that case wasn’t a big deal, even knowing the outcome — that the homes of Kelo and others were taken from them against their will and torn down, all to end up with useless vacant lots. (You might recall that a Connecticut Supreme Court justice who ruled against Kelo sees things differently now.)

The second story that made me focus on the arrogance of collectivists was close to me. Here in the Birmingham area, the city of Birmingham is mostly just the core older parts of town. It’s been losing residents for 50 years. Even though the metro area has a million people now, the core city is down to about 200,000. Although there are wealthy pockets remaining, most people who have the ability have moved to suburbs where the government isn’t so dysfunctional and the schools are still good (at least by modern standards).

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As I’ve been watching the leaves turn colors and then fall onto the ground and die this fall, I’ve been seeing them as a metaphor for empires from history that come and go. And I’ve been wondering whether the people who lived in those fallen empires ever had the sense that their empire was fading away.

My suspicion is that if there had been newspapers or bloggers in the dying days of the Roman Empire or the Mongol Empire or the Holy Roman Empire, one of them might have written something a bit like this: “Amid all the talk of gloom and doom in the Roman Empire today, it’s worth pausing to remember that our great empire remains the greatest and most powerful country on Earth. It is a nation with a promising future.”

Don’t you think they would have seen it that way? I say that because this country is clearly in decline as an empire. (Well, we’re usually too polite today to use the word “empire,” but it’s not really any different, is it?) Every great empire from the past has been seen as unique and long-lasting when it was powerful, but each has fallen over time. Even though the United States remains the strongest military force in the world and even though its economy is still very powerful, what is it that makes us believe we will be any different from those empires that have died and been replaced by something else?

The truth is that Americans really do believe — as the people of those empires believed — that we’re somehow different. We’re “the greatest country on Earth.” (Here’s a recent opinion column in the Los Angeles Times that sings yet another verse of that popular song.)

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In 1983, John Sculley was the president of Pepsi. He was the youngest president ever for the company when he got the job in 1977. As a marketing exec, he had been responsible for the Pepsi Challenge, a campaign so effective that Pepsi was catching up with long-term leader, Coke. He was very successful and very happy with his job. Then he met Steve Jobs.

In 1983, Jobs was looking for a new president for Apple. Even though he was a co-founder, he was considered too young and inexperienced for the job of running day-to-day operations, so he was recruiting someone successful who he thought he could work successfully with. He targeted Sculley. It was a crazy idea to try to get the head of one of the country’s most successful companies to come lead a small computer company, but Jobs went after what he wanted. Sculley later remembered how Jobs finished his pitch:

“And then he looked up at me and just stared at me with the stare that only Steve Jobs has and he said, ‘Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?’ And I just gulped, because I knew I would wonder for the rest of my life what I would have missed.”

Sculley took the job and spent the next 10 years at Apple, being one of the drivers behind some of Apple’s greatest growth in its early period. (The two men had a falling out that led to Jobs leaving Apple in 1985, but that’s another story.)

In our society, we’re raised to believe we’re supposed to be selling some form of sugar water. We live in a wealthy consumer society, so there’s nothing wrong with selling sugar water, whether your “sugar water” is cars or clothes or shoes or software. Somebody needs to buy all of those things. If somebody’s willing to pay you to do it, there’s a market for it. But for some of us, there’s a burning desire to do something that matters — to do something that has a chance to change the world.

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